'Martyrs' Director Pascal Laugier Wants To Freak You Out With A "Twisted" Sex Movie

By
Charlie Schmidlin
|
The PlaylistOctober 30, 2012 at 9:42AM

Before the royalty of French genre cinema took a handful of filmmakers under their wing to create modestly budgeted action exercises, from complete failures (“From Paris With Love”) to sequel-spawning blockbusters (“Taken”), the focus landed instead on some of the finest horror in recent years. Two brilliant, sadistic stand-outs remain Alexandre Aja's “High Tension” and Pascal Laugier's “Martyrs,” but while Aja's film dabbled heavily in the psychosexual, Laugier is set to take the element even further with his next movie.

Before the royalty of French genre cinema took a handful of filmmakers under their wing to create modestly budgeted action exercises, from complete failures (“From Paris With Love”) to sequel-spawning blockbusters (“Taken”), the focus landed instead on some of the finest horror in recent years. Two brilliant, sadistic stand-outs remain Alexandre Aja's “High Tension” and Pascal Laugier's “Martyrs,” but while Aja's film dabbled heavily in the psychosexual, Laugier is set to take the element even further with his next movie.

While at the UK premiere of his first English-language horror entry, “The Tall Man” -- which stars Jessica Biel and garnered a limited theatrical/VOD release stateside -- Laugier took the opportunity to reveal the direction of his next project, which he simply describes as “going even further away from the horror genre, but at the same time still a very genre related story; it's a love story.” He also described the film as a “sex movie,” but explained his reasons for staying away from the material thus far. “I've never filmed people fucking because it's been done so many times and so badly. [The film] is a love story that turns into something very twisted.”

If all the talk of aberrant sexuality conjures the name of a certain Danish director, who also happens to be shooting his own thematically related film entitled “The Nymphomaniac,” Laugier is already well aware. “I respect [Lars] Von Trier a lot as a director but we don't share the same style and we don't follow the same line. I hardly follow other directors when I'm writing my own stuff. I want to try being on set with two North American actors and, from my French perspective, ask them to do things that they'd never dare to do as North Americans. That's part of my motivation.”

So an interesting turn of events that we're sure has Shia LaBeouf rushing to get in touch. However, if Laugier does indeed plan on using American actors once more, hopefully he'll receive a better result than “The Tall Man,” which we called “too weird, soggy, and unfocused” to be anything noteworthy after the searing “Martyrs.” Regardless, Laugier confirms the script for his latest is already completed with pre-production moving along nicely, so expect to hear updates soon either way. [Bleeding Cool]